To get NGX, Kinross must talk to Brascan which owns Noranda as well. Northgate has Brascan as its main shareholder.
Brascan's Northgate takes mess out of Kemess: future bright at B.C.
gold mine
Saturday, February 16, 2002
KEMESS MINE, B.C. (CP) - Giant trucks roar through the February half-light with
purpose as Canada's newest gold mine revels in an optimism rarely seen in its
first troubled years in British Columbia's northern wilderness.
Like the price of gold itself, the huge Kemess Mine is enjoying a long-awaited
revival. It has been exactly two years since the mine rose out of bankruptcy at
the hands of tiny, Vancouver-based Northgate Exploration, a company controlled
by the Brascan Corp. (TSE:BNN.A) conglomerate.
See below for more facts on the Kemess gold and copper mine
This followed the financial flameout of Royal Oak Mines, a company led by
Canada's most famous and controversial female miner, Peggy Witte.
Royal Oak's demise left a trail of unpaid bills, hundreds of employees facing an
unknown future and a pack of creditors - including Brascan's Trilon Financial
subsidiary (TSE:TFC.A) - picking over the remains.
Under Trilon's ownership, the gold and copper mine has gone through a
staggering number of improvements that were denied during its first cash-starved
years. And Northgate officials eagerly speculate about the prospects for
an even richer new mine nearby.
Kemess (pronounced ki-MESS) now employs more than 400 people in B.C.'s
depressed northern Interior and is hoping for record production of gold, silver
and copper this year. More exploration this summer might also reveal the potential for decades of
additional production.
But bitter memories of the last days of Royal Oak and nearly a year of control by a court-appointed
receiver remain like snowdrifts piled around the fly-in, fly-out mining camp.
"It's the only place I've worked where the engineers had to buy their own pencils and bring them to work,"
says Patricia Maloney, the mine superintendent.
Maloney started at Kemess six weeks before insolvency and remembers trying to run the entire compound
with just three pickup trucks.
"Not only did the creditors come in and repossess the pickup trucks, but a lot of equipment used for the
construction of the tailings dam was leased, so it was also taken away," she says.
The tailings pond was one of the bigger messes left for Northgate to clean up - spiralling from an
estimated $40 million to somewhere around $150 million as the original dam width proved grossly
inadequate.
During the last days of Royal Oak, the provincial government threatened to close the mine if work was not
immediately done on the tailings pond. And without a feasibility study, Kemess had some strange features.
JAMES STEVENSON
Canadian Press |
